Sumptuous, great cast, wonderful cg, Apple's Foundation, "very" loosely based on Issac Asimov's masterwork, has unfortunately entered Star Wars territory by introducing a planet killer named Invictus. The problem with this nonsense is there is no planet killer in Foundation as Asimov's series talks of decay and renewal with emphasis on mathematics and politics to enable the writer to pen a space opera for the ages.
The premise of the stories is that, in the waning days of a future Galactic Empire, the mathematician Hari Seldon spends his life developing a theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematical sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a Dark Age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Although the inertia of the Empire's fall is too great to stop, Seldon devises a plan by which "the onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little" to eventually limit this interregnum to just one thousand years. To implement his plan, Seldon creates the Foundations—two groups of scientists and engineers settled at opposite ends of the galaxy—to preserve the spirit of science and civilization, and thus become the cornerstones of the new galactic empire.
One key feature of Seldon's theory, which has proved influential in real-world social science,[3] is the uncertainty principle of sociology: if a population gains knowledge of its predicted behavior, its self-aware collective actions become unpredictable.
Psychohistory is based on group trends and cannot predict with sufficient accuracy the effects of extraordinary, unforeseeable individuals, and as originally presented, the Second Foundation's purpose was to counter this flaw. Later novels would identify the Plan's uncertainties that remained at Seldon's death as the primary reason for the existence of the Second Foundation, which (unlike the First) had retained the capacity to research and further develop psychohistory.
Chaos theory anyone?
As a point of interest, haptics, described in Foundation's Edge on how best to pilot a starship, is Asimov at his best.
A 1980s era head-mounted display and wired gloves at the NASA Ames Research Center
Somehow Trevize had always assumed that if one were going to communicate by thought with a computer, it would be through a hood placed over the head and with electrodes against the eyes and skull.
The hands?
But why not the hands? Trevize found himself floating away, almost drowsy, but with no loss of mental acuity. Why not the hands?
The eyes were no more than sense organs. The brain was no more than a central switchboard, encased in bone and removed from the working surface of the body. It was the hands that were the working surface, the hands that felt and manipulated the Universe.
Taking something profound and turning it into Star Wars is questionable at best and it's a shame as the production values of Apple's Foundation is sound, the deviation from Asimov's vision is not.
Seems yours truly's not alone on why Apple's direction is incredibly wrong.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books aren’t Star Wars, or at least they’re not supposed to be. They’re not filled with burgeoning heroes, foreboding villains, laser swords, funky aliens, or even much action and adventure, really. They’re about math and science and a 1,000-year attempt to save and rebuild civilization after its collapse. That is why Foundation has so often been referred to as unfilmable, and apparently why Apple’s Foundation TV series has completely stopped trying.
Cue John Williams ...
Because that’s what Foundation has suddenly introduced, really. A giant warship so powerful it will let the Anachreons defeat everything the Galactic Empire can throw at it. It’s a sci-fi mega-weapon, just like the Death Star, Starkiller Base, or those dumb Star Destroyers with Death Star cannons attached from Rise of Skywalker. Foundation’s version is called the Invictus, which is literally the name of the Imperial Shuttle Han, Luke, and Leia used to sneak past the second Death Star into Endor in Return of the Jedi. There’s no Invictus in Asmiov’s books. There’s no mega-weapon of any sort, barely any space battles and, in fact, almost no action whatsoever, because that’s not the damn point. The thing threatening the galaxy isn’t an army of bad guys with guns, it's social corruption and decay. The Foundation doesn’t conquer its foes with starships, it does so through politics and economics.
It's going to be hard to continue to watch a series veering off course into Star Wars territory, a mashup of Dune, Lawrence of Arabia and King Arthur ...
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